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08 April 2018 1:22 AM

Actually, I wish the police would arrest people for defending their homes more often than they already do. It might finally alert the great complacent middle of British politics and opinion to what has happened in this country, so that they eject the people who are responsible, and achieve real change.

It might introduce more law-abiding people to the truth, that our country has been hijacked by elitist dolts, that one key result of this is that the police are not our friends any more, and that they do not serve justice in any way that we understand it.

The most contemptible voice in the midst of these events is that of David Gauke, the ridiculously entitled ‘Justice Secretary’, who claims to be on the side of homeowners against burglars. Oh really, Mr Gauke? Not unless you resign from your politically correct Ministry and your soppy party, you aren’t. Is it possible that you can be so ignorant about the workings of the state you claim to run?

The arrest of Richard Osborn-Brooks after the death of a burglar in his house is in fact a completely typical example of our Left-infiltrated police in operation. There is no point getting cross about it if you do not then demand a total reform of the police and the courts.

No doubt most police officers are perfectly nice men and women, who love animals and are kind to their mothers. But they do not work for us. They work for a state that has been taken over by 1960s radicals.

Have you ever asked why the police are so keen to arrest respectable people who defend their own houses? In general, they do not much want to meet the respectable classes. They have closed hundreds of police stations, and ceased regular foot patrols.

They have great trouble answering the telephone. If they appear in public at all, they do so in pairs, deep in conversations about overtime and clearly not wanting to be interrupted or distracted. They can’t conceal how bored they are by burglary and car theft.

They are unwilling to do anything serious about anti-social behaviour and defeatist on drugs. But defend yourself or your home with any vigour, and they are there in large numbers waving handcuffs and DNA swabs.

Meanwhile, in our capital city homicides rise, seemingly uncontrollably, to levels (so far this year) rivalling those in New York. These figures, unlike those for other crimes, cannot be concealed or massaged out of existence.

They tell a rotten truth about our whole country, that bad people daily grow more confident, and good people daily grow more scared. The answer to this puzzle is simple.

The police of this country are at their most enthusiastic when they are defending their monopoly against the danger of competition. It would be disastrous for them if anyone else started enforcing laws in the way most people want them enforced.

Any sign of old-fashioned law and order, and it must be stamped out swiftly, in case it catches on and puts their failed nationalised industry out of business.

For 50 years now, they have been pursuing fashionable, mad theories about crime, which were stupid when they were first suggested, and are stupider still now that they have been shown, in grim detail, to have utterly failed.

These theories are all based on the batty idea that criminals are not responsible for their own actions, and crime is not caused by human wickedness and greed, nor by lack of fear of being caught and punished.

Government and police alike think that crime is the result of bad social conditions, child abuse or one of the many forms of ‘discrimination’ of which we are all guilty.This is why people who do bad things are seldom punished.

With a very few exceptions, they are repeatedly let off, cautioned, cautioned again, given social workers to make excuses for them, fined, allowed not to pay those fines, fined again, let off again, given community service which they do not do, let off, given bail, not locked up when they commit new offences on bail, given bail again. They become the terror of their neighbours.

Then they are given suspended prison sentences which are not activated when they reoffend.

Eventually, after many years of this, when they have become career criminals and are beyond all hope of redemption, they may be sent to prisons which are run by the inmates, and almost immediately released again with tags round their ankles, which are not monitored.

Equally stupid commercial products and fashions from this era – such as flared trousers for men and Watneys Red Barrel – have long ago vanished from general sale and would be greeted with mockery and astonishment if anyone tried to reintroduce them.

But the liberal reforms of the 1960s – which, unlike flared trousers and keg beer, have done actual, real damage to society – live on unchanged.

The remedies are all simple: for example, the restoration of preventive regular police foot patrols, the repeal of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its pro-criminal codes of practice, the enforcement of the laws against drug possession, the return of the policy of ‘due punishment of responsible persons’ to the prisons.

The Left-wing purges of judges and magistrates, pursued furiously during the Blair years, also need to be reversed.

But who will do these things? Nobody, as long as the British law-abiding classes continue to rely on the political leadership which has made such a mess of this country for the past half century.

In which case it is a matter of time until somebody else – perhaps it will be you – is arrested by some wooden-faced plod for daring to defend his home against savage thieves.

*****

Theresa May has once again demonstrated that she is the new Harriet Harman, not the new Margaret Thatcher. Her ridiculous enthusiasm for last week’s frenzy about a ‘gender pay gap’, and her claim of a ‘stark division’ between the pay of men and women, are embarrassing.

The measure used, a crude average, told us nothing about the truth, which is that most employers obey the law enforcing equal pay for equal work, and try as hard as they possibly can to employ and promote women. Clumsy quotas may actually hurt women, as employers try to game the figures by giving low-paid, entry-level jobs to men, while appointing women to senior well-paid posts.

State nagging will not make things better. A serious conservative Premier would listen to the most thoughtful voice on the subject, Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs. She has shown that the statistics demanded by Mrs May’s Government conceal far more than they reveal.

They mainly show that, for whatever reason, women have different career patterns from men. In many cases, this is because women choose to do so. As Ms Andrews points out, this could be because women have more sensible ideas than men on the right balance between life and work.

When she explained this on the BBC, her ‘impartial’ interviewer finished the exchange by contradicting her. How can we have a proper debate on anything in this country when everyone has been taught what to think, but almost nobody knows how to think?

*******

Surely Winnie Mandela lost any respect she might have commanded (such as it was) after her endorsement of the practice of ‘necklacing’ those accused of informing by the African National Congress.

This was a mixture of torture and murder, whose victims took 20 unimaginable minutes to die after petrol-soaked tyres were placed over their heads and ignited.

01 April 2018 12:05 AM

Last week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been.We often hear it said of soldiers and others that they ‘gave their lives’ in battle. This is true in a way, though many actual soldiers will smile at the expression and mutter that they probably did not have much choice in the matter.

But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket at Trèbes, in southern France, he wasted no time in showing that he was capable of murder. He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages.

He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman.

Arnaud Beltrame calmly offered to change places with her. I believe that he knew as he did so that this might well cost him his life, and that by stepping forward he faced the strong possibility of a horrible and lonely death. Nobody ordered or asked him to do it. It would have been perfectly normal and acceptable for the police to have surrounded the mad killer and waited for him to give in, or kill himself, with the strong possibility that he would also kill his hostage.

Arnaud Beltrame went miles further than he was required to go by the normal rules of life, or even the normal rules of duty and bravery. The daily bargain, under which we behave decently to others and hope for the same in return, wasn’t enough for him. Most of us couldn’t have done what he did. Most of us will never be asked to.

But I very much doubt whether our civilisation would have reached the heights that it has reached if nobody had ever been ready to make such a sacrifice. I believe very deeply that Christian societies are different from non-Christian ones, precisely because all of us know that such selfless courage is the ideal of what we all should be. And I think that Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame did what he did because of the specifically Christian saying ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. This Eastertide it is worth noting that these words are recorded as having been spoken by Christ, shortly before he (knowing what was coming) was dragged off to face a mocking show-trial, torture, beatings and a savage public death. For Arnaud Beltrame had come, quite recently, to embrace Christianity.

In aggressively secular, hard-boiled France, this must have been difficult to do. Those of us who try to cling to the shreds of religion in the modern world feel increasingly besieged and hopelessly unfashionable.

My late brother Christopher was a militant atheist (but a good deal more thoughtful than most). He used to delight crowds of his supporters by demanding: ‘Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.’

In the end he tired of his own question and told me that he had found an answer. He thought that Lech Walesa, the lone and indomitable leader of Polish resistance to the might of communism, would never have dared take on such a huge and merciless enemy without his faith to sustain him. I suspect he would have felt the same about Arnaud Beltrame. And if this is true, and I think it is, is it time the rest of us wondered whether the West’s long mockery and dismissal of religion as childish and outmoded should now come to an end?

We need to know the difference between how things are, and how they ought to be, or what do we live and die for?

Why bother to leave the EU if we don't escape from the repressive European Arrest Warrant?

As someone who long wanted an independent Britain, I never cared all that much about the Single Market or the customs union. I see no signs that we will suddenly become a great exporting nation again if we launch out on our own – what have we got to sell after the massacre of industry in the 1980s? We’ll just import more stuff from different places.

But I think the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) is an outrage. I don’t care if it takes longer to extradite terror suspects from other countries. British police officers should not be forced to arrest anyone here on the say-so of some foreign magistrate. Continental law is totally different from ours, and much less fair and more repressive. Nobody should be sent to face a foreign court without a full extradition hearing.

This is particularly important now, as Spain’s government outrageously pursues (and locks up) Catalan nationalist leaders for daring to call for independence. In our tradition that is political persecution, and the police and courts should have nothing to do with it. Yet in Scotland now, a former Catalan minister, Clara Ponsati, is being sought by the Spanish authorities on charges of ‘violent rebellion and misappropriation of public funds’.

Without the EAW, could this even come to court? With the EAW, it has to.

Yet it looks to me as if Theresa May is hoping to keep us in the EAW. In her recent speech in Munich, she praised this nasty arrangement. She boasted that she had ‘successfully made the case for the UK to opt back in’ to the EAW and other measures, after we had been given a unique chance to escape from them. She claimed this was clearly in our national interest. I don’t agree.

And if we end up still subject to the EAW, or something like it, and outside the Single Market, then we will have got our departure from the EU the wrong way round. It was the loss of our ancient liberties that was always the most important disadvantage of belonging to Brussels. If we cannot get them back, why leave?

School Selection by wealth cruelly and irreversibly divides this country -why aren't the Left against it?

The BBC has (of course) given great prominence to yet another anti-grammar school ‘report’ by academics. As usual it is based only on the tiny rump of surviving grammars almost all in well-off areas because spiteful, dogmatic Labour councils closed most of the grammars in poor districts. But the BBC and other Left-wing media never seem to notice the many reports from the Sutton Trust, which show that the better comprehensive schools are savagely biased against children from poor homes.

The Trust found that 91 of the 100 most socially selective schools in England and Wales were officially ‘comprehensive’. In theory, they are open to all, but in fact they are most open to the well-off through catchment areas and other more complex factors that also favour the rich and pushy. The only solution the Sutton Trust can come up with is allocating places by lottery, a mad idea. They should look at how well grammars once worked, when we had enough of them. In 1954, the Gurney-Dixon Report found that roughly 65 per cent of pupils at grammar schools in England and Wales came from working-class homes. How many modern ‘good’ comprehensives can claim anything like the same?

Are we at last beginning to doubt the claims of the happy pill industry?

The one undoubtedly good thing about the new and gruelling film Unsane is that one of its villains is the ever-growing power of psychiatry and the pill industry that has taken it over.

Claire Foy plays an unhappy young woman who unwisely tells her woes to a counsellor and suddenly finds herself locked up in a mental institution, being dosed with pills which are clearly making her genuinely ill. On a much smaller scale, this is a terribly common story all over the Western world. I do wish people were more alert to it.

24 December 2017 1:47 AM

How can the police be too powerful and too feeble at the same time? This is perhaps the greatest avoidable scandal of our age, and yet nobody ever does anything about it.The decisions which led to this mess can easily be tracked down. I did it years ago, and have supplied the details to politicians (including Theresa May) and senior police officers.It benefits nobody, least of all the police themselves. So why is it never put right? The amazing fall of Damian Green might serve some purpose if it led to action. But will it? I couldn’t care less about Mr Green. I may have met him once, but am not sure. I despise his party and the Government of which he was a member. But the behaviour of some of the police officers who searched his parliamentary offices, and have since gone public with pornography claims, seems to me to be disgraceful and wrong. It is an improper use of powers given to them for other purposes.I shuddered when I first heard of the case, sensing in it a threat to freedom in general, as I often do these days. The initial arrest was dubious and looked political. This doesn’t just affect politicians. Thanks to powers very foolishly given to them, the police now act as judge and jury in thousands of cases. They can publicly ruin a person by noisily arresting him in a well-publicised dawn raid, even though they have no real case against him.They can make him unemployed by keeping him on endless so-called ‘police bail’. This is a sinister and lawless procedure, allowing police to punish individuals against whom nothing has ever been proved. And many of these decisions are taken by highly political people, trained and indoctrinated in the new dogmas of political correctness, quite distinct from the old-fashioned coppers who came from the normal world and shared the general view of right and wrong.At the beginning of the 19th Century, Parliament feared that the police would turn into just such an engine of oppression and secret power. Only when Robert Peel came up with his brilliant idea of citizens in non-military, modest uniform, unarmed and with tightly limited powers, patrolling the streets on foot, did MPs at last agree to allow an experiment.And it worked. It worked brilliantly. It never got too powerful. Its constables were the servants of the public, and knew it. Their presence on the streets prevented thousands of the sorts of crimes that now go undeterred and unpunished. They were a rallying point for the good and a warning to the bad. They never got above themselves, wore baseball caps or disappeared to go on sociology courses. The net of local police stations, open all hours and close to where we lived and worked, made it easily accessible. It never stopped working. Right into the 1960s, official inquiries confirmed that it was still highly effective. The most advanced academic research, by James Q. Wilson, has since endorsed it as the best type of policing known to man. By discouraging small offences, it discouraged large-scale crime too. It wasn’t perfect. There was some corruption, and some brutality. But these resulted from the failings of human individuals, not the system itself.Alas, a combination of liberal political reform and vain, fashionable innovation, backed by a few prominent journalists, ended it in a few short years. The police disappeared into cars and back offices, specialist squads and political correctness lectures. Wherever they were, they weren’t on the streets. Besieged by louts? Call back next week, we’re busy. Burgled? Fill in this form, we’re busy. People openly using drugs on the street? Not interested. But ask them to join in a Gay Pride march and they’ll be along, high heels and nail varnish at the ready. Police stations were closed by the hundred (it is still happening). Those that were not sold off were closed for most of the time, and in many cases have come to resemble Soviet border control posts, with those inside them cut off from the public by thick glass and long waits. New stations were sited far from town centres, to emphasise that the police don’t need us and expect the same in return.It is obligatory at this point to say that there are still decent police officers, and so there are. But St Francis of Assisi, or Superman, would struggle to do a good job under these conditions.It has all been a terrible, unnecessary mistake. It would be easy, cheap and popular to put it right. Mrs May would become a national heroine and be remembered as long as Robert Peel if she would only do it. Well, why doesn’t she?

Finally, the truth about our pointless nukes, from a man who REALLY knows

The unforgivable false allegations against Field Marshal Lord Bramall did achieve one good thing.

They reminded us that, still living in our midst, we have a great and distinguished soldier with real experience of war and battle, and an unrivalled store of firsthand knowledge and common sense.

So why wasn’t more attention paid to his trenchant statement a few days ago that the planned replacement of Britain’s Trident submarine fleet is a futile waste of money?

In his view, we should keep one boat and a few rockets and warheads for emergencies. It is as if Father Christmas had announced that reindeer were obsolete. You have to listen when someone so expert speaks.

He says: ‘Now the credibility has gone completely and it no longer deters. We would set a great example to the rest of the world by getting rid of them. The money could be better spent elsewhere.’

He adds what everyone in Whitehall knows in their hearts: ‘I can think of no circumstance whatever in which a British Prime Minister would authorise the use of nuclear weapons.’ Lord Bramall is no peacenik.

Nobody can claim he is a Russian or North Korean agent. He has faced real bullets, fighting for his country. His trained mind still blazes with fierce intelligence, and he has the courage to say what he really thinks.

So next time some noisy pseudo-patriot parades the worn-out and untrue arguments for this gigantic waste of national resources, remember what our most distinguished military mind thinks. The truth is, he has dozens of allies among today’s senior officers of all services, but they are scared of stupid politicians.

Happy Christmas

And so we come to that brief truce called Christmas. I still love it, despite everything.

I would cheerfully reintroduce transportation for life for the Albanians and their beat-box on the high street, on their 43rd rendition of Jingle Bells so far today.

The Queen’s Christmas broadcast sometimes comes close to converting me to republicanism. I am stonily unmoved by John Lewis Yuletide filmlets. But each year I live, the idea that the creator of the universe appeared among us as a defenceless newborn baby demanding nothing from us but love grows more and more true and persuasive.

Isn’t this, in fact, exactly how our lives are changed, over and over and over again?

Happy Christmas, and many thanks to all those who have sent me kind Christmas wishes.

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19 November 2017 12:03 AM

Most of these politically correct fads are just designed to wind us up and provoke us. For example, I now regret having wasted so much time trying to argue rationally about same-sex marriage. All the sexual revolutionaries wanted was an excuse to call me a bigot. They could then ignore everything I said, or tell lies about me, or both.

It was a tiny issue. In 2014, for example, in England and Wales, there were 247,372 heterosexual weddings, and 4,850 same-sex marriages. Already there are several hundred same-sex divorces each year.

Once the novelty has worn off, I suspect the numbers of same-sex unions will decrease, just as heterosexual ones are doing. The point – that the old ways are dead and gone – will have been made, and the campaigners will move on to something else.

I once thought the same about the transgender issue. But the idea that people are whatever sex they think they are is a terrifying weapon in the hands of modern Thought Police. Whatever you say, you cannot possibly be right about this.

Express any opinion (apart from total submission), and within minutes you will be besieged by condemnation. It will be cleverly based on the idea that you are somehow being cruel to some troubled person, even though you aren't doing this at all.

But that is just a pretext. In reality, a whole moral and social system is being destroyed, and traditional ideas of male and female are the next target, now that husbands and marriage have been done away with. For once you begin down the road of sexual revolution, there's no end. There will always be someone more militant than you.

Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.

The opposite view (now very unfashionable) is that we are all made in the image of God and cannot be changed into something else. This sounds odd to most modern ears. But in fact it is the foundation for the absolute respect for human life and liberty which underpins civilisation. Once it's gone, you can make excuses for anything in the name of some invented 'right'. Mass abortion is the obvious example.

And that is why The Mail on Sunday's exclusive story, that a teacher has been disciplined for failing to respect the transgender gospel, is so important. His slip was small, and momentary. One of his pupils, who would once have been called a girl, has decided to be male. He called this person a girl. So he must suffer.

In the vanished world of absolute truth, the student's sex would not be a matter of opinion. People might (and I would favour this) treat the person's view of their sex with sympathy and try to go along with it. Who would want to hurt somebody on a matter of such delicacy?

But in the new revolutionary world, truth is what the revolution says it is. This works in many ways.

A Left-wing newspaper recently claimed I had said something I had not said, and do not think. Shown irrefutable evidence that I had not used the words alleged, it continued to claim that I had used them, because that is what it thought I had said.

This leads down a very dark staircase. Reality must increasingly be forced to fit the beliefs of the new elite. Teachers must be punished for speaking the truth, so schools are no longer places where truth is respected or dissent allowed – which means they are dead to all intents and purposes.

And perhaps most grievous of all, teenagers are placed on a medical conveyor belt which leads to powerful body-changing drugs and possibly to surgical alteration.

It is not just crabbed reactionaries such as me who fret about this. In an eloquent article in The Times, the far-from-conservative commentator Janice Turner recently warned: 'But in a decade, when our adult children turn to ask, 'Why did you let me do this? Why didn't you stop me?' we may wonder if this was progress or child abuse.'

The answer to the question 'Why didn't you stop me?' will be even sadder.

We are failing to stop this because we are afraid of the intolerant revolutionary mob, which would lock up dissenters if it could, but for the moment contents itself with Twitter storms and witch-hunts.

I can't laugh this off. It is not just a wind-up. It is a threat to free thought and, after many months of staying silent about it, I feel I have to say so.

That faint rumble you can hear is the mob assembling for another heresy hunt.

An image that tells you all you need to know about duty

The sight of the Queen and Prince Philip watching the Remembrance ceremony last Sunday was almost unbearably poignant for me and (I suspect) many of my generation.

The Duke of Edinburgh was plainly straining every nerve and sinew to do honour to the fellow warriors he actually knew and fought alongside so long ago, despite the burden of his great age. Nothing on Earth was going to stop him doing that. There are so few left from that time. The Queen, with an almost equal effort of will, was yielding one of her most important duties to her successor, a very hard duty indeed.

They are now both so far ahead of us in years that they already seem to be in another time altogether, almost beyond our reach. It is disquieting and upsetting to see these things, inevitable as they are. I feel a great sense of foreboding.

The Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians

Last Monday the Prime Minister rattled her plastic sabre at the Russians, in a silly speech at the Mansion House. She doesn't even know what she's talking about. She said: 'Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea was the first time since the Second World War that one sovereign nation has forcibly taken territory from another in Europe.' This is wrong. Nato Turkey (now an increasingly nasty despotism) seized Northern Cyprus in 1974 and still sits there, unpunished.

She claimed Russia had 'repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries'. I asked No 10 for details. Two days later, whimpering that the information was somehow secret, a spokesman could only admit 'Russia has not violated UK airspace'. So whose airspace had it 'repeatedly' violated? No answer. If it's true, the Russians must know, so why the secrecy? The Russian threat is a fake.

Antidote to The Death Of Stalin

At last there is an antidote to the foolish film The Death Of Stalin, which trivialises this monster and his crimes. It is Angus Macqueen's brilliant, harrowing documentary Gulag, which you can watch on the BBC iPlayer only until December 6.

See it above all for the astonishing film of the man-made hell called Norilsk, and the interview with a woman who explains exactly how Stalin robbed her of the ability to trust her fellow humans. But be warned: there are no jokes.

12 November 2017 1:38 AM

Anyone who texts while driving a car is a deliberate killer. He or she knows the risks and can be said to have the intent to kill. The only thing that separates this from murder is that the killer does not care whether or who he kills. He knows his action could be fatal, and he still does it. If he fails to kill anyone, he is morally no different from a would-be murderer who shoots but misses.

If we ever did have the sense to restore the death penalty, I would be happy to see it applied to such persons, for example to Peter Morrison, whose moronic, selfish, savage behaviour killed Highways England traffic officer Adam Gibb and paralysed his colleague Paul Holroyd. These good men were out in filthy weather, trying to clear up after another crash.

Morrison was driving his show-off Mercedes car at an average speed of 81mph on the M6 in rain so heavy one witness said it was like being in a car wash. Yet he was seen shooting past other cars ‘like a missile’. The killer, convicted last week of causing death by dangerous driving, admitted his use of a phone at the wheel was ‘unwise’.

But he denied it was dangerous. While he did this ghastly thing, he was preoccupied with football, sending 25 WhatsApp messages in 17 minutes – one 96 seconds before he slewed off the road to kill Mr Gibb and ruin many other lives besides. Could this ‘happen to anyone’? I do not think so. But something like it could ‘happen’ to someone you know, today. And someone else you know could be killed or terribly injured as a result.

Every day, I still see people on their phones while driving. And if I reprove them, they jeer that I can do nothing about it because the police don’t care, which is true. Does anyone in this country not yet know that it is dangerous to text while driving? Is there the remotest excuse for this? Even at 20mph, those who do it risk killing or injuring a child on a suburban road. What will stop them doing it?

It makes me so angry that I am tempted to suggest a few public hangings at motorway services, with the killers’ heads left to rot on spikes along the central reservation, Game Of Thrones style. But even I recognise this is going a bit far. Let us compromise on the reintroduction of police traffic patrols, which have vanished as totally as police foot patrols. Speed cameras do not remotely make up for their disappearance.

And they have disappeared. A friend of mine recently drove from London to Glasgow and did not see one patrol car. I am sure this is quite typical. I know they are busy painting their nails and doing Gay Pride parades, but couldn’t they spare a few hours for this task as well? It is no good making the fines bigger and bigger, as we keep doing,

if people are confident they will never be caught. If the moron Morrison had been caught texting, and properly punished, he wouldn’t now be the broken, astonished creature he is, amazed at the consequences of his own folly and doubtless full of self-pity. And his victims would still be happy and healthy, and their families would not be devastated. Yet somehow it is nobody’s priority to do anything about this.

********

Not long ago I jeered at Madame Tussauds for refusing to make an effigy of Theresa May. They had set themselves up as constitutional experts, and decided that a Prime Minister who had not been ‘elected’ did not deserve to be fashioned in wax. Of course, Prime Ministers are not elected, but get their power from Parliament, which is elected. Mrs May, since she went to the polls, has actually been much less of a Premier than she was before. And I bet she wishes that Tussauds had not bothered.

Her appearance there in meltable form has just led to more cruel jokes about how feeble and temporary she is. The image looks a good deal more cheerful and confident than the real thing. And so it is. The Government is itself a wax museum. It has no true purpose, except to follow a policy – exit from the EU – which most of its members dislike. Almost any determined lobby can, by squawking loudly enough, secure the sacking of any Cabinet Minister with the aid of bored media. Nothing lies ahead except embarrassment and bungling.

It is, I think, the end of the Tory Party, which was unwisely kept on life support by deluded voters and greedy donors when it should have been given decent burial a decade ago. Without some astonishing earthquake, a Corbyn government is coming and it is hard to see how it can be prevented. What is left of the Tories will no doubt adopt the policies of Mr Corbyn, as they adopted those of the Blairites, after a brief struggle with what they call their consciences.

They will do anything to get office. Well, what will you all do then, those of you who insisted on sticking to the Tories, and keeping them alive, however many times they betrayed you? It is precisely because the Tories believe in nothing that they are so useless. Get used to the idea that you now have no friends at all at Westminster. It has been so for years, but from now on it will be painfully obvious.

********

If we cannot be sure that there is a special invisible bond between mothers and their children, then we cannot be certain about anything. But if this is so, how can we justify the current strident fashion for urging mothers to go out to work when their children are small? I was struck very deeply by one tiny piece of the reminiscences of Esther Rantzen’s daughter Rebecca Wilcox (who has chosen to stay at home with her own children).

It read: ‘As a toddler, my elder sister Emily used to wave Mum goodbye at the door and then go straight to her bedroom window overlooking the driveway, to watch for her return. ‘At the time Mum was never told about this daily vigil, but, looking back now, she admits it breaks her heart.’ Shouldn’t it break all our hearts? And if not, shouldn’t it make us wonder if we are pursuing a wise and good policy?

Most women go out to work because they have to, not because glamorous jobs in TV await them.

*******

How ridiculous to put a statue of George Orwell, author of 1984 and stickler for clear truthful English, outside the BBC’s HQ. Orwell was a leftist, beyond doubt. But he was also a patriot. And he was not the sort of soupy, evasive, jargon -encrusted leftist who flourishes at the BBC. He didn’t like the Corporation when he did work for it, long before it became the shameless liberal propaganda organ it is now. In fact, if a real live Orwell were with us now, I don’t think they would welcome him.

*********

I remember when breakfast on a train was a feast and a treat, miraculously perfect eggs, bacon and toast prepared in a tiny galley and served with immaculate style on linen tablecloths. It’s gone for ever, and people have to bring their own. But could they please not be like my neighbour on the Cambridge to London express the other day, and eat horrible vegan snacks which fill the whole carriage with the aroma of pickled cabbage stewed in Marmite?

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08 October 2017 2:24 AM

There is some justice in Theresa May’s ghastly humiliation last week. She did much to help kill the Tory Party. It is only fitting that she should be bruised by its flailing death throes.When she dubbed her own movement ‘The Nasty Party’ all those years ago, she was helping a powerful liberal faction which wanted to crush all that was still conservative in the Tory organisation. Her 2002 speech was full of modish calls for diversity and embracing the 21st Century. Rather than fighting against the sticky menace of Blairism, she and the Tory liberal faction had chosen to embrace it and copy it. They didn’t understand how revolutionary New Labour was, because they knew nothing about Left-wing politics and less about economics. They didn’t necessarily even like it. But they thought that copying it was the easy path back to office. The steep and rugged pathway, of actually fighting for conservative, patriotic ideas, didn’t appeal to them at all. As it happened, it wasn’t that easy. It would take years of copying the Blairites, of picking up hints on politics from Peter Mandelson, of stamping out pockets of conservative resistance, to turn the Tories into New Labour. They even found their own Blair in David Cameron.And all this finally bore fruit on February 28, 2008, when the then Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, and his chief political commissar, Caroline Thomson, went to Westminster to meet Mr Cameron. The BBC still refuses to say what took place at this meeting. I think Mr Cameron persuaded the new priesthood of the liberal establishment that he and his party were now fully Blairised. For BBC coverage of the Tories, which had been savagely hostile since the mid-1990s, softened noticeably and began to turn favourable. There was only one problem with this – the voters. Actual Tories were dying out and not being replaced. The comprehensive schools, brilliant at teaching their pupils what to think and useless at teaching them how to think, had been turning out Labour voters for decades.Try as the experts might to bend and twist the opinion polls, it was plain that the Tories could not win a majority in 2010. No amount of money or friendly media coverage could do it. The Tories duly lost the 2010 Election, their fourth defeat in a row.They had spent eight long years of grovelling to The Guardian, and got no reward. They should have collapsed and split. Alas, nobody noticed. The Tories entered a shameful coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a party which despises and opposes almost everything conservative in Britain. Millions of Tories seemed to think that being in office was more important than what you did when you got there. They were so pleased to see a nominal Tory in Downing Street that it took them years to notice that he was if anything less conservative than Gordon Brown, the man he replaced. And so we bumbled on, drifting deeper into debt, starting the disastrous Libyan war, solving none of Britain’s urgent problems and making many of them worse, until a tide of hedge-fund money, pouring into Tory funds, gave them an actual majority in 2015.This was a dreadful accident. And it finally exposed the problem. What the Tory establishment wanted, and what its supporters wanted, were two completely different things. Above all, this highlighted the linked issues of mass immigration and the European Union. Ukip rose and grew.Mr Cameron, who has never understood the power of the European issue, airily promised a referendum on the EU. He did so to save his party, not to help the country. I am sure he never intended to win the 2015 Election, and hoped a second coalition would get him out of his pledge. Instead, his promise may well have destroyed Britain as we knew it. We are now in a permanent constitutional crisis over Europe, as a pro-EU Parliament mechanically and sulkily goes through the motions of leaving the EU it wants to stay in. And it has exposed the emptiness of the Tory Party, which made a bonfire of what was left of its ‘nasty’ principles and sought to survive through big money and by sucking up to the BBC. Mrs May went to the podium on Wednesday as the empty leader of an empty party. She had nothing to say. The stupid slogan stuck to the wall behind her was so ashamed of itself it fell down. The special ill luck which befalls doomed leaders provided the cough, the attention-seeker with the P45 and the embarrassing, desperate standing ovation. There is no saviour. Making feeble jokes about Caracas or raising the ghost of Lady Thatcher will not fill the gaping void. The Tories have nobody left who really believes in anything. Meanwhile, the other side is full of people who know what they are fighting for and cannot believe their luck.Once upon a time, it didn’t matter that the Tories had no ideas. But in modern Britain, faced with a Labour Party which intends to revolutionise the country, they had a choice. They needed to understand and fight this dangerous enemy. Or they could stop thinking, and become just like their foes. They chose the second weak and cowardly course. I shan’t be crying for them. They have at last got what they have long deserved. If anyone is going to save us from Jeremy Corbyn, it won’t be them.

This is NOT how frazzled Army wives look, Jessica

In our transgender, metrosexual era, it gets harder and harder to remember what men and women used to be like. For me, the new BBC Sunday night soap opera The Last Post is almost unwatchable. In 1960s Aden, did the Royal Military Police really look like male models dressed up as parking wardens? Did their harassed, frazzled wives really look as if they had spent all afternoon at the Aden branch of Vidal Sassoon, as Jessica Raine does?If you want a real, poignant true-life drama about male and female courage, stoicism, patriotism and grief, turn instead to the amazing series on the Vietnam War, screened absurdly late on Monday nights on BBC4. It is, among other things, astonishingly fair. More than once, while watching this rare example of real, serious television, I have found myself weeping. If we would only learn from this terrible episode, how much happier we would be. Yet today’s governments behave as if they had never heard of it.Once the BBC would have screened this in prime time. Now it lacks the character or courage.

It’s never ‘tough’ to pick on the dead

The spirit of justice seems to be dead in many parts of this country. I always disliked Ted Heath but I am revolted by the police treatment of him, and by some public reaction to it. The police do not decide guilt or innocence. No man should be condemned without a hearing and we are all innocent until proven guilty. Have we forgotten these ancient British rules? I hope not. Now I gather that the Church of England’s hierarchy are trembling in their cassocks about a report (soon to be published) into their disgraceful smearing of the late Bishop George Bell, a man of real courage and principle who makes them look like pygmies.To appear as if they were tough on today’s real paedophiles (which they aren’t), these prelates condemned Bishop Bell on the basis of a solitary uncorroborated allegation made decades after the alleged crime. Blackening the names of dead men to boost your own reputation is a pretty wretched thing to do. We can only punish it with contempt. But we should punish it all the same, or nobody is safe.

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24 September 2017 2:03 AM

Prince William has been duped by the drug legalisation lobby. I can only assume he was misled by foolish or unsuitable advisers or lobbyists, who sought to use him. But he should have known better. When people who are supposed to be impartial want to take sides, they have a number of tricks for smuggling their opinions into public view.

BBC journalists finish their ‘unbiased’ reports by saying ‘but many believe…’ and then sticking their own opinion on the end.

People who want to boost a cause but lack the courage to say so openly will call for a ‘debate’ on an issue where most of us are quite happy with the way things are. The ‘debate’ will then give a platform to those who want radical change. That is its aim. Dissidents will be first bullied and mocked, and then excluded completely.

And then there are the people who ask a ‘question’, as William asked a ‘question’ about drug legalisation. Question, my foot. They ask it of people whose response they can easily predict, in this case drug abusers. Like the debate-mongers, they choose a subject where, yet again, there is a busy campaign for radical change.

Right now, the subject is almost always the legalisation of drugs, especially cannabis, a horrible, desperately dangerous objective which is alarmingly close to succeeding. You should wonder why.

This has not just happened out of the blue. It is the result of powerful, quiet and expensive lobbying, of the sort which Left-wing radicals usually loathe. Yet those who denounce the fast-food and soft-drinks giants, or attack Big Tobacco for seeking to profit from misery, are strangely relaxed about the Global Big Dope lobby.

And that lobby loves the way nobody has noticed it is a lobby.

But now a very rich, very ruthless minority scent victory after years of hard work and big spending. Media types who view marijuana and cocaine as normal, and let their children smoke dope at home, are part of this. They have combined with crazed ‘libertarians’ who think we should all be free to destroy ourselves, even if we destroy our families and neighbours in the process.

But they would be nothing without the backing of those who see an opportunity for gigantic profits from drugs openly sold on high streets and on the internet, and advertised on TV, radio and in newspapers.

Years of heavily funded campaigning have been dominated by the arch ‘libertarian’ billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. Mr Soros is said by American media to have spent at least $80 million on this issue.

In California, the recent dope legalisation campaign, Proposition 64, also got the support of the ultra-rich. Former Facebook president and technology billionaire Sean Parker gave almost $9 million to this unpleasant cause.

Alongside people such as these, who are presumably motivated by misplaced freedom-loving idealism, are other less-idealistic rich people who just want to be richer and long to rake in the big profits to be made. And a growing number of amoral politicians see the chance of raising billions in taxes on human misery, so badly needed by the empty treasuries of Western nations. Why, the cash might even replace the revenue lost as cigarette smokers (literally) die out.

Poor William was such a sucker when he went on his visit to a ‘rehab’ facility. He swallowed whole the fiction that drug abuse is a disease and needs ‘treatment’. This is pure tripe. Drug use is voluntary. Diseases are compulsory.

I know there are people who like to make excuses for illegal drug use. But they are a faction, with a political aim. Their claims are dubious, to put it mildly. Heirs to the throne have no business taking sides with them.

And who told William that former drug abusers were ‘key people’ to ask? The real sufferers from the collapse of our drug laws are those who live in areas where drug abuse is routine, thanks to police inaction, and those whose children have ruined their lives and health by drug abuse. When will he ask them? There are no shiny, fashionable and well-funded clinics, patronised by royalty, for such people.

And how can William be so clueless as to think that men and women are still sent to prison for using drugs? The singer Pete Doherty was caught with heroin in his pockets in a criminal court building and didn’t go to prison, for heaven’s sake. The tragic billionairess Eva Rausing (now dead) was caught trying to take crack cocaine and heroin into the US Embassy in London, and was let off with a meaningless caution.

Observing last week’s non-resignation by Boris Johnson, and Theresa May’s non-sacking of him, has been like watching a pair of elderly walruses trying to play basketball.

There has been plenty of grunting, wheezing and whimpering and flopping about – but no action and no score.

Mrs May doesn’t have the strength to sack him and he does not have the strength to do a Heseltine and march out of her Cabinet. And I strongly suspect their real opinions on the EU are very similar anyway.

It is all quite useless. Real debate on leaving the EU – which must surely end with us taking the Norway option – is not even happening. David Cameron and those who were fooled by him are to blame.

His aim, from the very start, was to save the Conservative Party rather than to save the country. And if things go on as they are, it may well be that the country’s wellbeing will be sacrificed for the sake of that wretched organisation.

What a waste of time, since the Tory Party is dying anyway, and is probably the only political grouping in the Western hemisphere that could be beaten by Jeremy Corbyn.

I can’t say I’m sorry to see that the name ‘Nigel’ is dying out, but I’d be happier if it wasn’t being replaced by made-up names out of TV series Game Of Thrones.

Where did ‘Nigel’ come from? I have long suspected it is a hangover from the forgotten popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wonderful romance Sir Nigel, just as I suspect that most Jeremies, such as Messrs Corbyn and Paxman, owe their Christian names to the even-more-forgotten but once vastly popular pre-1939 novels of Hugh Walpole, whose hero was a schoolboy, Jeremy Cole.

Odd that we turn to fiction for names people will have to put up with in real life.

Many congratulations to the tough, independent-minded Labour MP Graham Stringer, who saw off the Green zealots last week.

A noisy and fashionable BBC presenter, Adam Rutherford, launched a public campaign to stop Mr Stringer being re-elected to Parliament’s Science Committee, where he has been a rare voice of dissent against the Warmist frenzy, preferring cool science to overheated religious fervour on the subject of global warming.

Mr Stringer (a real scientist who has a chemistry degree) reckoned this wasn’t a very impartial thing to do. The BBC backed down. It can be done, but you need to try.

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11 June 2017 1:14 AM

The laughable failure of Mrs Theresa May’s empty, tremulous campaign was in fact predictable. I suspected it would happen. But I mostly kept quiet about it here for the past few weeks.

This was not because I have any time for Mrs May and her feeble, politically correct government, but because I did not much want to help Jeremy Corbyn either. And at election time, there’s no room for neutrality.

There’s one good outcome. This farcical unwanted Election must surely have shown everyone a key fact – we now live in a country where the supposed natural party of government can no longer really command a majority.

That’s like having a fridge that doesn’t keep your food fresh, or a bicycle with no wheels. If we had any sense (do we?) we’d dump this dead, rotting faction in the nearest skip or landfill, and find a new one to replace it. The Tories failed on Thursday because they have long believed in nothing and are interested only in being in office.

They won in 2015 only because of a grotesque splurge of millionaire donations, and ultra-expensive black magic techniques, which partly made up for the collapse of their once-majestic membership and the machine it supported.

They are, in effect, a zombie party, lurching and shuffling along in a procession of the undead, thanks to transfusions of money and the BBC’s ancient broadcasting rules, which guarantee them air time.

What happened next must be one of the strangest chapters in our history. Labour (which had itself become a zombie party under Blairite control) changed its leadership election rules, and accidentally made it possible for a real socialist to win. You’d never get a real conservative coming to the top of the Tory Party, which has elaborate mechanisms in place to stop that happening.

Odder still, the man who won, Jeremy Corbyn, was astonishingly old-fashioned, a country-bred grammar school boy brought up by parents who had taken part in the great political struggles of the 1930s.

He is out of his time, which is no bad thing. To see him address a rally in modern Britain (as I have done) is a bit like going to the station to catch your regular commuter service, and finding a steam train waiting at the platform – surprising, nostalgic, wheezy and ancient, more or less certain to break down, but wonderfully picturesque.

It struck me as I watched him that he was far more dangerous than the Tories thought he was. His absolute courtesy and refusal to make personal attacks appealed to many in my generation who remember a different and in some ways better Britain.

His realisation that George Osborne’s supposed economic miracle was a sham, and that many have lost hope of getting steady, well-paid jobs or secure homes, appealed to the young. He may not have any actual answers to these questions, but he at least knew they were being asked. His absolute opposition to the repeated stupid wars of recent years also has a wide appeal, in many cases to conservative-minded people and Service families sick of the waste of good lives.

A genuinely patriotic, socially conservative party might have had a proper response to these things. But the Tory Party is not that. It is just a cold machine which runs on gallons of expensive snake oil. So it decided to attack Mr Corbyn personally.

This bounced off him. In fact, the long Tory assault on Mr Corbyn was his greatest asset. When the campaign began, and people had a chance to see what he was really like, especially his dogged politeness under fire, they did that rather moving thing that British people do when they see a lone individual besieged by foes. They sided with him against his tormentors.

It was no good raving about Mr Corbyn’s Sinn Fein connections, when the Tories have themselves compelled the Queen to have the grisly IRA gangster Martin McGuinness to dinner at Windsor.

It’s not much good attacking his defence policy when the Tories have cut the Army to ribbons and the decrepit remnants of the Navy sit motionless by the dockside, thanks to Tory cheeseparing. And now there’s an even bigger problem.

The young, who used not to bother, have begun to vote in large numbers, and Jeremy Corbyn has persuaded them to do it. Labour’s 40 per cent of the vote, almost 13 million ballots, reflects this.

The Tories cannot rely forever on the fact that older voters turn out more reliably. This is the last warning conservative-minded people in this country are likely to get.

Unless they can find their own Corbyn, a principled and genuinely patriotic leadership, no amount of money, and no amount of slick technique can save them from a revived and newly confident Left.

They failed to win this Election. There’s a strong chance they will actually lose the next one.

We are shocked by Vladimir Putin’s macho remarks about how he never has a bad day ‘because he is not a woman’ and so does not go through ‘natural cycles’ that make the female sex more emotional.

No Russian would be even slightly discombobulated by this sort of thing. Feminism in Russia is still firmly associated with communist tyranny, under which International Women’s Day was ruthlessly enforced.

The only result of this was millions of burned meals, produced under duress by sulky Russian men who greatly resented being told the sexes were equal.

Many more people die in car crashes than die in train or plane crashes. Yet we – quite naturally – make much more fuss about the rail and air disasters. This is because so many victims die at the same time.

But, while this is understandable, is it wise? If the roads are so dangerous, and they are, we should be taking action about it. But because the deaths come in small numbers, we do not. This problem is even more pressing when it comes to terror attacks. By treating them as national catastrophes, we make them more important than they are, and (I fear) fulfil the sick desires of the killers, who long for headlines. Look at these figures for non-terrorist crime: two teenagers were fatally stabbed in London in the past two weeks. The number of teenager murders in the capital has already equalled that reached in the whole of 2016. That is to say 12 teenagers have been murdered so far this year, nine of them stabbed. In today’s London, someone is stabbed to death roughly every other week.

More of these attacks would have been fatal had it not been for the astonishing skill and dedication of paramedics and surgeons, who regularly save people whose injuries would have been terminal only a few years ago. I wonder, too, how often vehicles are nowadays used as weapons by people who are not terrorists. There have been recent attacks of this kind in New York and in Marbella, not connected with terror at all.

I am fairly sure that, if investigated, many of the culprits of these horrors would (like most terrorists) be found to be users of mind-altering drugs. Yet amid all the other calls for this and that, there is no will in the police or the courts to enforce our laws against drug possession. I do wonder if this is not an even more urgent matter, for more people, than the more obviously spectacular terror menace.

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